Adventures in Solo Blogging: The First 100,000 Pageviews

Feb 18, 2011

Going from writing for one of the biggest tech blogs in the world to writing my own blog again is obviously quite a change. Not only do I have to manage all the gritty details of my server setup, but not having a few extra sets of eyes around to find interesting stories makes finding breaking news items a bit harder. That said, there is something exhilarating about being your own boss, having full control over what you want to write about and not having to fulfill a certain quota of posts every day.

From the beginning, my plan was to write a few words about my progress here whenever the site hit worthwhile milestones. While I’m still a few hundred pageviews short, chances are the server will push out its 100,000th page later this weekend, so today feels like a good time for a short recap.

Starting from (Close to) Zero

I did, of course, not start this blog from zero. One advantage of having written for a larger organization before is that I was able to get quite a few followers on Twitter – which is key to getting any kind of exposure these days. I was never very active on Facebook and while I did get quite a few visitors thanks to people who shared my stories there, very little of that is due to my presence there. Having an active group of followers on Twitter, though, as well as a bit of a reputation in the business, surely helped get this blog off to a good start in its first few weeks.

One place where NewsGrange had absolutely no presence to start out with, though, was Google’s search index. It took until the end of January before I saw any search referrals from Google at all. My story about Qwiki/Fwiki got quite a few links from sites large and small around this time. Chances are that this was what finally put the blog on Google’s map.

Top Stories

#1 – Qwiki Clone in 321 Lines of HTML: The Qwiki/Fwiki story also remains my biggest hit here so far, with just under 25,000 pageviews. The majority of those readers came from Hacker News (where it was actually submitted twice and got 49 upvotes and 114 upvotes respectively). This story also did quite well on Reddit and was shared more than 200 times on Twitter. The funny thing about this post is that I actually found out about Fwiki on Hacker News on a Saturday night, thought it would be fun to write a few sentences about it and then mostly forgot about it until I noticed a huge spike in traffic to the site when I checked up on the server on Sunday afternoon.

#2 – Why One Egyptian ISP is Still Online: As Egypt went offline, all the news reports mentioned that one ISP was still online. Usually, this was mentioned in passing, but I thought it would make for an interesting story to break this out and look at why this one ISP, Noor Group’s DSL service, was still hanging in there. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one interested in this. The story got just under 10,000 pageviews, was shared on Twitter 137 times, hit the frontpage of Hacker News and climbed to the #1 spot on Techmeme for a while.

#3 – Is Apple Getting Too Greedy?4,000 pageviews, 148 Twitter shares and over 30 comments. Apple’s in-app subscription program clearly stirred up quite a few emotions. My own feeling was that Apple was simply going to far by taking a 30% cut from all subscriptions and I’m guessing that putting this into the headline really helped the post do well. It also helped that it was the #1 sub-headline for the main story about the in-app subscriptions on Techmeme.

#4 – Why Your Next Car Will Have an IP Address: This story came just a few days after I officially started this site and got just over 3,100 pageviews. Interestingly, a lot of these came from auto enthusiast and non-tech sites. The story was shared 272 times on Twitter. It probably helped that I had already seen the Ford Focus electric during a press event in Detroit earlier in December and was able to fill the story out with a bit more detail than those who just had to work from press releases and Ford’s announcement at CES.

Challenges

#1- Depending on Hits: As of now, the blog is still too dependent on hits and few readers come in through the homepage. Part of this, of course, has to do with the fact that it’s hard to keep a magazine-like frontpage updated often enough to make coming to the blog directly worthwhile. Hopefully, as I pick up my pace, that will change.

#2 – Need Advertisers: With traffic picking up, now is the time to start looking for advertisers. I’m just running some Google ads and cheap CPM ads here right now. While they pay enough to keep the servers on, the only way to make real money from the blog here is to sell ads directly, I think. Interested? Drop me a note at [email protected] and we can work something out.

I should note that keeping the server running has thankfully not been a challenge. I’m hosting this blog on a very basic Linode virtual private server. So far, my current setup, with the Cloudflare CDN as my first line of defense, has held up extremely well and coped with all traffic spikes without a hitch.